It's bad enough that John Brennan, President Obama's
national security deputy, thinks Gitmo jihadi recidivism
is
"not that bad." But in his talk last week
with Islamic law students at New York University,
Brennan made even more reckless comments about our
counterterrorism programs while pandering to one of the
worst Muslim grievance-mongers and sharia peddlers in
America.

During the question-and-answer session, Brennan welcomed
a question from Omar Shahin. He identified himself as
the head of the "North American
Imams Federation." What he didn't mention was
his role as the chief ringleader of the infamous flying
imams. You remember them: They were the six Muslim
clerics whose suspicious behavior—provocatively shouting
"Allahu Akbar!"
before boarding the plane, fanning out in the cabin
before take-off, refusing to sit in their assigned
seats, requesting seat-belt extenders, which they placed
on the floor—led to their removal by a U.S. Airways crew
in 2006.

In coordination with the Council on American-Islamic
Relations, Shahin and his radical delegation attempted
to
shake down the airline with a discrimination lawsuit
and
bully the citizen
"John Does" who flagged the imams'
security-undermining behavior. CAIR mouthpiece Ibrahim
Hooper blasted
"anti-Muslim hysteria" by those who saw
something and said something about the imams' in-flight
shenanigans. Shahin ranted in a teleconference strategy
session in 2007 that, indeed, he and his cohorts were
spoiling for the incident and
planning to engineer
"many, many
cases" to sabotage airline security efforts.

As head of the
Islamic Center of Tucson in Arizona (home to past
jihadi dry-run plotters), Shahin preached that his
followers must put Islamic sharia law above Western
laws. He told the
Arizona Republic that he doubted Muslims were behind
the 9/11 terrorist attacks, concluding:
"All of these, they make it up."[Arizona
Was Home to bin Laden ''Sleeper Cell'' by Dennis
Wagner and Tom Zoellner,
The Arizona
Republic, September 28, 2001]Brennan didn't appear
to know who Shahin was. Somebody around him should have
briefed him. Shahin's involvement in Hamas-linked
charities and radical Wahhabi
"youth groups"
has earned the Jordanian-born naturalized citizen
increased
FBI scrutiny over the years.

Instead, Brennan treated him as just another innocent
Muslim with
"reasonable" concerns about the government.
"We came to this
country to enjoy freedom," Shahin began with faux,
flag-waving emotion.
"We feel that
since September 11, we aren't enjoying these values
anymore. … Also, we feel that there's a big lack of
trust between Muslims' community and our government. …
My question: Is there anything being done by our
government to rebuild this trust?"

Instead of countering the narrative, exposing Shahin's
true intentions and vigorously defending America's
homeland security apparatus, Brennan dutifully
genuflected to the gods of political correctness. Obama,
he told the militant 9/11 inside-job theorist and jihad
white-washer, is
"determined to put America on a strong course."

No, not a "strong
course" that includes national security profiling of
Islamic radicals pretending they care about our
country's best interests. By
"strong course,"
Brennan assured Shahin, he meant a course toward
assuaging the civil rights groups who have objected to
every security program at airports, borders, train
stations and visa offices for the past nine years.

Brennan told Shahin that the post-9/11 response of the
Bush administration was a
"reaction some
people might say was over the top in some areas"
(insert indignant grievance-monger nodding and
mmm-hmming here), and that
"in an overabundance of caution, (we) implemented a number of security
measures and activities that upon reflection now we look
back, after the heat of the battle has died down a bit,
we say they were excessive, OK."

It gets worse: Brennan then went on to decry the
"ignorant
feelings" of Americans outraged at the jihadi
attacks on American soil. And then he told Shahin and
the audience of Muslim students that he
"was very concerned after the
attack in Fort Hood as well as the
December 25 attack that all of sudden there were
people who went back into this fearful position that
lashed out not thinking through what was reasonable and
appropriate."

The Fort Hood jihadist slaughtered 14 innocent soldiers
and an unborn baby after an
Army career of openly threatening the lives of our
soldiers, and Brennan is wringing his hands about
the rest of us
"lashing out" over government incompetence. He
believes our true sin is not in the systemic
underreacting by the military, homeland security, intel
and White House officials in charge, but in the
"overreacting"
of the American public.

With clueless capitulationists like Brennan in charge of
our safety, who needs enemies?